I use Sublime Text every day. I love it. I paid for it. I even develop plugins for it.[1] But I don't recommend it to peers. Why? Because Sublime Text has a low bus factor.[2]
6 years ago, I bought TextMate. Like Sublime Text, I enjoyed using it. Sadly, TextMate became abandonware. The sole developer suffered burnout. Bugs were never fixed. Promised features never showed up. Users wanted to fix these issues themselves. They begged the developer to release the source code, but it never happened. TM 2.0 was open-sourced, but TM 1.5 remains proprietary.
Developers marry their editors. They spend years learning every aspect of them. They customize their configuration. They install and develop plugins and extensions. If an editor becomes abandonware, the users of that editor have wasted an immense amount of time. All of their knowledge and work surrounding their editor becomes useless. They're forced to start over with something else.
All that said, I would recommend Sublime Text to others if the developer made an anti-abandonware pledge. The pledge would be to release the source code if no new version had been released in more than a year. I realize he has to make a living. Heck, I don't mind if he gets filthy rich from selling Sublime Text. I'm simply worried that despite his good intentions, he'll end up hurting his users in the long run. With an anti-abandonware pledge, users would be able to avoid the fate of TextMate users.
1. Sublime Text 2 (and also Textmate 1.5) are STILL good editors. And they will continue to be good editors for the foreseeable future. Just like Vim and Emacs. You don't need a newer version every year. Even though Vim and Emacs DO release newer versions, I have no idea what is in the new releases. Why? Because Emacs 22 and Vim 6.3 do well enough. Textmate 1.5 does well enough. Sublime Text 2 does just fine.
2. I get the bus factor ideal, but it doesn't always turn out that way. Sure it's a chance, but look at the Jack Slocum, ExtJS situation. He was a one man show. He was a machine that could output beautiful amazing work. Then he actually let Sench Labs take over. He seemed to disappear for a time. They had a few stumbles. Now he's back. Same could happen. The same could happen for Sublime.
Overall. I don't see it as a hinderance. Watch Railscasts or Peepcode. They don't seem to have a problem using a 5 year old editor. Heck, I still use a table saw from 1982.
Actually, Emacs 24 was quite an important release that improved many things. For example, it introduced an integrated package control and lexical binding.
If everyone involved with Sublime disappeared tomorrow, Sublime would still work -- and likely continue to be usable for at least a few years.
I don't understand what the concern is here.
As you say, developers marry their editors. I certainly would be frustrated if Sublime were abandoned tomorrow, but I'd still rather use it today over any other editor.
Like we aren't used to this too. Textmate and many other good editors were left eating dust and no one died. If Sublime Text dies I'm sure another will take its place.
I'm also a Sublime Text 2 paying customer who doesn't actively recommend the editor, though I find a lot to like about it.
For me, the reason is a bit more day-to-day practical in that I find myself increasingly doing development on Linux systems running on ARM chips and Sublime Text has no support for ARM builds. It is something often asked for in the forums and on the userecho site but is always shot down by the developer.
Editors are an odd case for me as a developer in that I'd rather use an editor I like slightly less that works on every platform I use in a consistent manner than use one that I like more but has limited platform support.
If it had something like tramp in Emacs, that wouldn't be an issue. Heck, I sometimes log in to remote VPS where I have an Emacs configured to suit all my needs, open Emacs there and edit file on my local machine using Emacs tramp.
There is an excellent sftp sync plugin for sublime text. It's not free but has a similar nag trial option. I don't have the name or link off hand though.
>I use Sublime Text every day. I love it. I paid for it. I even develop plugins for it.[1] But I don't recommend it to peers. Why? Because Sublime Text has a low bus factor.
Life has a "low bus factor".
This bus might hit YOU, after all.
Enjoy what you can, while you can. Who cares if you have to move to something else in 5 years?
Do you feel like the years you used TextMate were wasted? Haven't you wrote stuff with it?
I've seen tons of promising OSS projects becoming abandon-ware when a few core developers left -- or taking a turn and getting rewritten in a way I couldn't stand.
Case in point, TextMate becoming Open Source (isn't that the case, IIRC?) didn't really help it overcome obsoleteness. It got some new builds, and a few guys tinkering, but nothing worthy to use as a 2013 editor.
Tcl seemed to have a lot of the wind taken out of its sails when Ousterhout moved on. The language was - and is - still developed by very competent people, but it seemed to suffer some from the lack of a visible leader.
And it's fabulous, I switched from Sublime Text 2 last week and have no interest in Sublime Text 3 anymore. I was disturbed that Sublime Text 2 had several irritating bugs that I encountered most days and yet all dev was going into the next version that would require a new license. Also I am a sucker for OS X native feel and ST2 clearly had effort put in there, but still fell short.
I use TM2 regularly and really like it for these reasons. My only real gripe, and why I might switch to ST3 at some point, is auto complete. TM technically has code completion[1], but I've never found it particularly useful compared to the popup style that ST and XCode use.
I keep trying the alpha every now and again but there's some little annoyances that to me make it a step backwards in usability from TextMate 1, let alone Sublime Text. e.g.
* Double clicking a directory will make that directory the top level directory in the project side bar.
* Having to double-click to open a file; you can single click but only if you click the small file icon instead.
* Silly fading animation whenever you open a file.
I know most of the time I use the file search anyways but those first impressions really put me off using it.
For me it was the switch from ATSUI to CoreText for the code view rendering. It completely changed the way the text was antialiased, and removed the faux styling for fonts that lacked variants. As someone who liked Monoco, this killed it for me.
At the time TM2 was still private beta and not yet open sourced. I figured if I was gonna change to a CoreText editor, ST2 had the better support.
It would also be nice if my $70 license included free upgrades to future versions. There's just not enough new for me to spend $70 every year for a slightly better text editor. I'll stick with whatever version it is that I have now.
Emacs is old, complex and beautifully configurable. Vim is elegant and fast until you see Vimscript. Sublime is modern and great of out-of-the-box, but developed by a very smart guy that won't talk to his users on the forums).
No. The Python API is being significantly improved in Vim 7.4, but there has been no notion of moving away from Vimscript or even dropping support for the other languages (Ruby, TCL, Lua, MzScheme and Perl (i'm probably missing 1, but meh)).
I don't buy into that. These guys have spent their time and money building something that provides real value. Opening the source will directly compromise their ability to make that money.
Nothing is stopping YOU from building an editor in your own time and making the source available.
Sublime was able to change it from a "buy once, always use" to paid upgrades. This makes it a more sustainable business model. This is something that TextMate never had.
The trouble is, being rich already is a sustainable business model. If you have a tool where the only developer(s) working on it have made enough money that they don't need to continue running it commercially and have no personal interest in building more than they already have, paid upgrades are no guarantee of anything from a user's point of view.
As a counterpoint, as long as the version you already have is useful, and as long as it's a permanent copy that is not going to just stop working if the supplier takes their ball and goes home (I'm looking at you, Adobe), all you're risking is not having improvements that you were never guaranteed anyway. If the current version is better for you than whatever else you could have used instead, it's probably still worth buying it even with no future-proofing, IMHO.
> Developers marry their editors. They spend years learning every aspect of them. They customize their configuration. They install and develop plugins and extensions. If an editor becomes abandonware, the users of that editor have wasted an immense amount of time. All of their knowledge and work surrounding their editor becomes useless. They're forced to start over with something else.
This is like saying you won't marry that beautiful girl because she can die tomorrow and you will not know what to do with her dresses. Isn't more logical to enjoy beautiful girls and pleasant software while they are here?
> This is like saying you won't marry that beautiful girl because she can die tomorrow and you will not know what to do with her dresses. Isn't more logical to enjoy beautiful girls and pleasant software while they are here?
Yeah, because it's fair to make an analogy between a Girl and a Text Editor. A text editor is a tool, I want the hammer to be there for me tomorrow, you can't assure that with a closed source editor (After Text Mate I swore I wasn't going to make the same mistake again, ever.)
Precisely my point: a tool is a tool, you don't marry a hammer and you don't marry your text editor. You can have several hammers in your toolbox, the old hammer will never be jealous from new hammers.
You may invest some time/money on custom accessories for some editor, but if the author disappears it is not like a divorce, you can still use the tool until it breaks: if you can't get spare parts to fix your broken hammer because the maker went out of business, you just go to the hardware store and get a new hammer from other supplier.
>The bus factor is the total number of key developers who would need to be incapacitated (as by getting hit by a bus/truck) to send the project into such disarray that it would not be able to proceed.
So, higher is better ? I was wondering too the other day and settled on "augmenting the bus factor", in a good way.
I don't think that's fair. As others have said, ST2 is a great editor and will be for a while.
I'm probably an aberration, but I don't customize my text editors beyond the basics, and I definitely don't write plugins for them. It would probably make me a better developer, but I'm just not motivated to do that.
You didn't mention what you do recommend to peers?
You're not an aberration; defaults are defaults for a reason. Perhaps around this community it's more common to stray from the vanilla editor but in most cases people will adapt to whatever's given straight to them.
In the case of ST2, it was pretty damn solid out of the box. There's tremendous power in the customization, but it's in no way required.
Precisely. I salivate for Sublime Text, but I restrain myself from even trying because of that. Vim is very powerful and will probably run on my contact lens in 10 years.
I've been married to Photoshop for almost 20 years (which already ties me to either OS X or Windows) and our relationship has recently gone sour financially. Open Source gives you a peace of mind that's very reassuring when it's your daily, almost irreplaceable tool.
Your suggestion is good, I think we haven't yet reached the sweet spot between user freedom and developer paycheck.
6 years ago, I bought TextMate. Like Sublime Text, I enjoyed using it. Sadly, TextMate became abandonware. The sole developer suffered burnout. Bugs were never fixed. Promised features never showed up. Users wanted to fix these issues themselves. They begged the developer to release the source code, but it never happened. TM 2.0 was open-sourced, but TM 1.5 remains proprietary.
Developers marry their editors. They spend years learning every aspect of them. They customize their configuration. They install and develop plugins and extensions. If an editor becomes abandonware, the users of that editor have wasted an immense amount of time. All of their knowledge and work surrounding their editor becomes useless. They're forced to start over with something else.
All that said, I would recommend Sublime Text to others if the developer made an anti-abandonware pledge. The pledge would be to release the source code if no new version had been released in more than a year. I realize he has to make a living. Heck, I don't mind if he gets filthy rich from selling Sublime Text. I'm simply worried that despite his good intentions, he'll end up hurting his users in the long run. With an anti-abandonware pledge, users would be able to avoid the fate of TextMate users.
1. https://github.com/Floobits/floobits-sublime
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor